The deep structure of south-central Taiwan illuminated by seismic tomography and earthquake hypocenter data

The Taiwan mountain belt is generally thought to develop above a through-going basal thrust confined to within the sedimentary cover of the Eurasian continental margin. Surface geology, magnetotelluric, earthquake hypocenter, and seismic tomography data suggest, however, that crustal levels below this basal thrust are also currently being involved in the deformation. Here, we combine seismic tomography and earthquake hypocenter data to investigate the deformation that is taking place at depth beneath south-central Taiwan. In this paper, we define the basement as any pre-Eocene rifting rocks, and use a P-wave velocity of 5.2 km/s as a reference for the interface between these rocks and their sedimentary cover. We found that beneath the Coastal Plain and the Western Foothills clustering of hypocenters near the basement-cover interface suggests that this interface is acting as a detachment. This detachment is located below the basal thrust proposed from surface geology for this part of the mountain belt. Inherited basement faults appear to determine the geometry of this detachment, and their inversion in the Alishan area result in the development of a basement uplift and a lateral structure in the thrust system above them. However, across the Shuilikeng and the Chaochou faults, earthquake hypocenters define steeply dipping clusters that extend to greater than 20 km depth, above which higher velocity basement rocks are uplifted beneath the Hsuehshan and Central ranges. We interpret these clusters to form a deeply penetrating, east-dipping ramp that joins westward with the detachment at the basement-cover interface. It is not possible to define a basal thrust to the east, beneath the Central Range.